


Sleep don't weep

by baehj2915



Category: X-Men: First Class (2011) - Fandom
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Alternate Universe - Domestic, Erik's understandable insomnia, Fluff, M/M, Sleepy Charles
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-07-21
Updated: 2012-07-21
Packaged: 2017-11-10 10:30:34
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,754
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/465276
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/baehj2915/pseuds/baehj2915
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Erik has trouble sleeping. Charles sort of makes him a little bit. Fluffy AU from the movie where they stay together--because I want them to and for no other reason--and Erik extemporizes about their relationship. Not nearly as dramatic as the title indicates. I just picked that because it's a Damien Rice song I like.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Sleep don't weep

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Wagnetic](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Wagnetic/gifts).



> Happy Birthday, Wagnetic!

Erik is awake. 

Of course, Erik is almost always awake. He traditionally gets about four to five hours of sleep, when he can sleep. His routine couldn’t have been called a routine really. Not since he was a child, before the ghetto. He was used to missions and tasks and interruptions and conforming his needs to fit around his goals. Now that his life was almost entirely domestic, he was often at a loss for what to do. 

He doesn’t need a particular reason to be awake, but he is now because something is digging into his back. 

It’s Charles. 

Sharing his bed with someone for more than a half hour is also a new routine, along with nighttime’s designated sleeping hours. As is considering the bed he sleeps in to be his own. Adjusting to Charles’ own particular sleeping quirks hasn’t been the most difficult trial he’d ever endured, but it certainly makes him feel strange. 

Charles is currently trying to nest underneath him, he guesses. Erik was sleeping on his side, leaning toward his back. But Charles is tucked up underneath him, his breath huffing softly between his shoulder blades, an arm curled tightly around his waist, and his legs tangled in between Erik’s. It’s a little awkward because of Erik’s position. Not exactly spooning. More like Charles is attempting to use him as a shield, or cover his head under Erik’s back.

(Charles almost nightly puts a pillow over his face. No matter how many times Erik removes it, there it returns. Erik has added the task of making sure Charles doesn’t smother himself to his list of faux-husbandly duties.) 

Neither of them are good sleepers.

Erik’s developed a lifetime of purposefully light sleep. He wakes at small creaks and changes in light. He’s always been half-tense, ready to spring up at sudden danger. It isn’t particularly conducive to his current lifestyle. 

Charles, on the other hand, is active and restless in his sleep. He moves and rolls in bed. He talks—he talks and talks and talks. He kicks and bucks and sprawls. He sits up. Sometimes he gets out of bed, half asleep, turns on the light and turns it back off, or takes a book off a shelf, or puts his clothes back on. He steals blankets and pillows or throws them on the floor. He clutches Erik desperately tight or pushes him off the bed. 

He wakes up properly with regularity and goes for a walk around the mansion, usually coming back with the smell of fresh air or orange marmalade or cigarettes.

On occasion, Erik goes with him, but not often. 

Erik has never asked, but he figures that most of this is due to Charles’ powerful telepathy, searching out other minds even in his sleep. He knows some of the things Charles says in his sleep are not generated from his own mind. Some of them—a Yiddish word here or there, barely remembered street names, angry expulsions of Herr Schmidt— are most definitely Erik’s. Of course there is Raven across the hallway and Charles tendency to mutter, “My hair, don’t pull my hair.” Though that could very well be Charles’ vanity and nothing else. And he suspects that a stray recurring desire of Charles’ sleeping mind to slap the bedside lamp to the floor comes from Alex, whose room his only a few doors down. 

The one thing Charles doesn’t do is snore. In waking hours, he is baffled by Erik’s bafflement. Of course, Charles says. His nose is perfect, he says. 

(Out of all the wonderful body parts he could be smugly proud of, as he is something of a beauty in Erik’s humble opinion, Charles chose his nose. Not his firm, white thighs, nor his compact, smooth torso. Not his beautiful pale skin sparsely freckled. Not his cock, one of the few Erik has seen that he would deem visually attractive—perfectly proportioned to the size of his testicles, fitting perfectly in Erik’s hand, and perfectly smooth and even-colored. Not his able hands. Not his coquettish mouth, or his boundless, ethereal blue eyes. His nose.

So Erik has given up trying to understand a good deal of Charles’ choices.) 

Erik, apparently, does snore. 

The single most terrifying thing Charles has ever done was waking up Erik on one occasion by sitting on his stomach and looking up his nose with a flashlight. Erik is still shocked to this day how he reached such a deep level of sleep that allowed Charles to sit atop him without waking him. Unsurprisingly, the blind panic in Erik’s waking mind resulted in Charles being turned to the floor almost instantly, with Erik already pulling the metal of the flashlight to him as a weapon. 

Charles was largely unconcerned about the whole thing. He calmly told Erik he had a deviated septum and crawled back in bed, offering his backside to cuddle against.

(After several moments of anxiety about his ability to defend himself, and protect Charles, fearing anyone could kill them all if even Charles could sneak up on him like that, Erik did finally relax and take that offer on Charles’ backside. A very hard-to-resist backside has his little Charles.) 

Charles tries to burrow further into Erik’s back, somehow moving closer despite there being no actual distance between them. His back is beginning to ache from the arch he finds himself in. The position is untenable and he wants to move, but he’s usually unable to deny Charles anything he wants. Even if it is this ridiculous, unconscious desire to climb inside Erik’s body via aggressive cuddling. But a cold foot pushed insistently at his calf changes things and Erik pulls himself out of Charles’ grasp. 

He rearranges their bodies to a situation he generally feels safer with—that of his larger body pulled around Charles’ back. Erik prefers to be the outer shell of their little cocoon. Or, as Raven would say, the bigger spoon. Aside from the simple physical sensation of his soft hair and warm bottom, he likes the delusion that in their impossible marriage they can draw a direct line to Charles as the wife and Erik as the husband. He likes to think that if anyone spied in on them that he’d be ready to assume the role of protector in their understanding. 

Charles seems to like indulging him for the most part.

Charles has no qualms about being attended to in small ways. He likes being tucked under Erik’s arm. He likes being arranged. He likes it when Erik pulls a chair out for him. He likes Erik’s forays into caring for his body as long as they extend no further than sex and massages. 

But Erik knows it is all pretense and fantasy. Charles, after all, doesn’t need protecting and probably hasn’t for quite a long time. 

Charles is the real protector in their relationship. He lives and breathes caring for people. All people, all lives, all minds are Charles’ domain, in his mind’s eye. Erik has struggled his entire life to keep himself alive, while Charles can literally shut down any conflict to his safety that he confronts. 

And Erik has never felt safer or happier than when he is with Charles.

It still hurts to admit, though. 

Even as he tucks Charles under his chin, the desire to take refuge in him, rather than be one for him, is strong. He wants to lay Charles on his back and sleep on him, resting his head on Charles’ slim chest and cling tightly like a child would. That is the only way Erik can truly rest. It fills him with a calmness he hasn’t felt since his youth. It surpasses anything he ever felt, he thinks, even as he feels ridiculous doing it. He feels ridiculous because Erik outdoes him by a good five inches and twenty pounds. Charles is both younger and less experienced. He’s more pure of heart and more whole of mind. 

Erik doesn’t feel it’s within his right to take such comfort from Charles. 

Of course, Charles takes no greater joy than in giving that to Erik.

There is an alternate sense of wonder and jealousy in knowing that Erik is attended to by a man most people see as so visually inoffensive they count him as implicitly trustworthy, not even knowing he’s likely the most powerful person they’ll ever meet. Erik wants to be that. He wants others to know Charles is that equally as much. 

All of it makes him feel guilty. Piles on to more guilt that he feels at all times, that erodes at his spine and stomach. It’s a shameful little vulnerability of his, particularly prone to it when he’s still awake like this. 

Suddenly those doorways shut, and he’s aware of it. Those thoughts have been banished with a forceful and obvious hand. Bereft of them, it’s both soothing and bitter. 

But Charles tightens his arm around Erik’s, and sinks further into his chest. He mumbles something that sounds like “go to sleep.” 

“I should be angry with you,” Erik whispers, “for taking away my thoughts.”

Charles simply nods halfway through a satiated breath as his body relaxes against Erik’s. 

Another push drifts through Erik’s mind and he can sort out the pieces a little, like a puzzle, and reads them rather disconnectedly as _calm_ and _sleep necessity_ and _forgiveness_ and _surrender_. It’s like Charles’ signature. Erik doesn’t truly know if Charles does it on purpose consistently—so Erik knows and can take issue if he so chooses—or if Charles is simply incapable of not leaving a mark on his mind when he’s half asleep.

Regardless, it makes Erik feel instantly heavy and lethargic. 

A yawn forces its way out of his mouth. “Getting you back for this.”

“Of course, dear.”

Erik can be angry with him, but it never truly penetrates. He can’t find the real anger over Charles’ abilities when he’s always led to awe instead. Even though he’s used to choosing all the fights he could choose, that awe makes it hard for him to pick this one with Charles. 

He might not sleep the whole night, but he supposes he should appreciate he finally has someone who takes his health and peace of mind so seriously. He can’t keep his eyes open any longer, but he thinks it doesn’t really matter anyway. 

Erik always wakes before Charles. And he doesn’t need mind control to get a glass of cold water for payback.


End file.
